An Audience with Lord British Part Two

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By Robert 'Apache' Howarth

As promised, part two of our audience with Lord British is now online. His brother Robert Garriott popped in to help answer some questions as well. Some topics on the table include: Ultima Online, other NCsoft games like Lineage, and AI in MMORPGs. Plus, a new Tabula Rasa screenshot.

VE3D: Ultima Online is ten years old now this fall. That game has amazing longevity. With the current generation of MMOs, what are some of the things you feel need to be in Tabula Rasa in order for it to have a chance to enjoy the kind of longevity UO has had?

Richard Garriott: Let me back up and tell you how I feel about this whole genre, the MMO genre. First of all, any MMO that has ever in its life gotten over the 100,000-player mark is still here. All of them. You would think that competition and new games would ultimately peel away those players and somehow it does not. In addition, it's not the same people playing [the game] all those years&#Array;all these games have a churn where new people come in.

Early on, one of the big things we talked about is when and where is market saturation for these online games. People thought we were near market saturation, since we began before we made U.O. Before U.O., the biggest online game in history had 15,000 players. So when EA was doing sales projections for it, "since it's Ultima and you [Garriott]," they said, "maybe we'll give it 30,000." Well, 50,000 people paid to become beta testers on U.O.! Then when it launched, it sold out immediately of its first run of 100,000 copies and became the fastest-selling PC game in Origin history. So, we thought, surely there can't be anything bigger than that. Then, of course, EverQuest comes out and beats that. Then all these other games keep coming out, many of them getting past the 100,000 mark&#Array;then, of course, WoW.